Nowthen Mayor Jeff Pilon, City Council members and representatives from Comcast held a symbolic groundbreaking Tuesday outside the city offices to kick off the effort.
"Finally," City Council Member Dan Breyen said before tossing a shovelful of sand airborne. "And not just in one little area. From east to west, from north to south, now we will have high-speed Internet."
Comcast is in the midst of expanding its fast fiber network in all or parts of seven cities in Minnesota: Corcoran, Cologne, Grant, Hugo, Rogers, Stillwater Township and Nowthen.
Construction in Nowthen will begin in the southwest corner of the city, and move at a rate of about a mile a day. The service will allow customers, if they choose to sign up, access to Internet speeds of up to a gigabit per second for residential service and business speeds up to 100 Gbps, the company said.
Minnesota has a statutory goal of ensuring all Minnesota businesses and homes have access to at least one broadband provider with download speeds of at least 100 Mbps and upload speeds of 20 Mbps by 2026.
The state still has work to do to meet that goal. About 229,000 homes and businesses across the state were still without high speed Internet, according to the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development's Office of Broadband Development's 2023 annual report.
"We are a society that needs fast, reliable Internet," said Rep Paul Novotny (R- Elk River) "That became an important issue during COVID" with people on Zoom for meetings and kids at home doing school work. This is a big deal to move forward."
While some Nowthen residents, businesses and even the city offices already have high-speed Internet from other providers, the Comcast expansion will cover the entire city with about 1,300 addresses. And that includes about 50 homes that otherwise would still remain unserved.
"We decided to step into the 21st Century before it was half over," Mayor Pilon said jokingly while noting the city of fewer than 5,000 residents has been working on the issue for probably a decade or longer. "It's an exciting day for us."
Contractors will begin laying fiber cables on Monday with a goal of having service available at every door in the city by fall.
"It's about time," said Rene Perkins, owner of Dave Perkins Contracting across the street from the Nowthen city offices. "This is going to help a lot of things. A lot of people can't afford to run it up to their house and pay for it themselves."
Perkins said he had Internet service with CenturyLink, but "it was not the best." He plans to switch over to Comcast.
Taxpayers will not foot the bill, the mayor said. Comcast is spending $6 million on the project. Nowthen is using a $2.5 million "Border to Border" grant from the Minnesota Office of Broadband and other grants to cover the remaining costs.
"This is a huge game changer," said City Council Member Shanni Fladebo. "It's amazing for us."
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